Gemstones, whether precious or semi-precious, may have a high monetary value, which makes them prone to robbery or falsification. Therefore, there are many advantages in being able to identify gemstones in a unique way. It is known to identify gemstones through the use of an identification code. Such code can be marked on the gemstone. However, markings can be easily erased or replaced and thus are not secure enough. Document US-2016/0232432 discloses systems and methods for identification of gemstones. The gemstones can be imaged and image analysis can quantify one or more external and/or internal characteristics of the gemstone. The quantification of the one or more external and/or internal characteristics of the gemstone can be compared to a previous characterization to positively identify the gemstone. Proposed methods include line and shape matching. Such methods can involve heavy computation and may necessitate the provision of several images of the gemstone under different viewing angles. Therefore, such methods may be inadequate to identify uniquely a great amount of gemstones within reasonable computing time and computing power. Typically, such methods would be inadequate for cases where the method is to be applied to over one million gemstones per year, or even ten million gemstones per year.
Therefore, the invention has the object of providing a method for computing a unique identifier for a gemstone with limited computing time and limited computing power, while providing a reliable unique identifier.
Indeed, for a given gemstone the unique identifier may be computed a first time, to obtain an original identifier. Such original identifier can be stored in an original identifiers database, for example with other items of information relating to this gemstone (weight, color, clarity, cut, origin, producer, current owner, etc. . . . ).
At later point in time, in order to recognize and identify the same gemstone, a new computation using the same method for computing a unique identifier is used to compute a retrieved identifier. This retrieved identifier can be compared to the original identifiers in the original identifiers database to find a matching original identifier. If a matching original identifier is found, then the gemstone is positively identified and the associated items of information for that gemstone can be retrieved.
Therefore, the method for computing a unique identifier must have a high repeatability.